nostalgia

Gobbledygeek episode 56, “You Can’t Go to Riverdale Again,” is available for listening or download right here.

Nostalgia…it’s that bittersweet pang, that intangible sense memory, when you encounter something that makes you want to go home again. It’s also informed many major geek properties these past few decades, and is a buzzword of late thanks to J.J. Abrams’ Super 8. AJ and Paul discuss things that make them nostalgic, the films Super 8 lovingly pays homage to, and of course, the movie itself. Plus: news, the boys’ review of The Killing season 1, and a spectacularly dumb Formspring question.

Next: we’re off for the Fourth of July holiday, but we’ll return July 9 with all-new geeking.

ORIGIN: 1770, Modern Latin rendering of German heimweh, from Greek nostos “homecoming” + algos “pain, grief, distress.” (i.e., you can never go home again.)

In 1981, HBO had about five movies that played over and over and over again: Star Wars, Friday the 13th, Billy Jack, The Little Dragons, and…Hawk the Slayer. Now, seeing as I was eleven years old, addicted to science fiction, horror, gunslinger/martial arts, cheesy teen romance, and, of course, fantasy, and I already had an obsessive personality, I watched all of these films ad nauseum. This may go some distance towards explaining a great deal about me, but that’s for another column.

My memory of Hawk the Slayer was that it was a dumb but harmless bit of 80’s sword-and-sorcery fluff. Well…I had the dumb part right.

Voltan (the Dark One, we’re informed…many times), played by Jack Palance, confronts his apparently-twenty-years-his-junior father and demands his birthright, the “keys to the ancient power.” Since Voltan (the Dark One) speaks with the Gravelly Voice of Evil Scenery Chewing and wears the Helmet of Evil Burn-Scarred Face Concealment, naturally the wise father refuses. What’s an aspiring tyrannical overlord to do in a situation like that? What’s that you say? Stab his extremely youthful father in the heart? Precisely. Baby-Daddy winces slightly as he’s brutally murdered by his Crone-Son and the bad seed exits stage left.